The Elevator in Film & Fiction

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Darren Star
Sex and the City
The Belles of the Ball (2001)

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Aerosmith
Love In An Elevator (1989)

Workin like a dog for the boss man

Workin for the company
I'm bettin on the dice Im tossin
I'm gonna have a fantasy

But where am I gonna look
They tell me that love is blind
I really need a girl like an open book
To read between the lines

(chorus)
Love in an elevator
Livin it up when I'm goin down
Love in an elevator
Lovin it up till I hit the ground

Jackies in the elevator
Lingerie second floor
She said can I see you later
And love you just a little more

I kinda hope we get stuck
Nobody gets out alive
She said I'll show you how to fax
In the mailroom, honey
And have you home by five

(chorus)

In the air, in the air, honey one more time
Now it ain't fair
Love in an elevator
Lovin it up when Im goin down

Love in an elevator
Goin down

(chorus)

Gonna be a penthouse pauper
Gonna be a millionare
I'm gonna be a real fast talker
And have me a love affair

Gotta get my timin right
It's a test that I gotta pass
I'll chase you all the way to stairway, honey
Kiss your sassafrass

2008-02-16T17:34:00.000-08:00

Cameron Crowe
Singles (1992)

Plot: Romantic comedy about six of Seattle's young people, most of whom live in the same apartment building and whose lives revolve around the city's ever-expanding music scene. The inter-related stories about each character's progress through the singles scene are intriguing and often very funny, and the soundtrack is a grunge fanatic's dream, with the likes of Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Mudhoney.

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Irwin Allen
The Towering Inferno (1974)

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Midnight Lace (

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Stanley Kubrick
The Shining (1980)

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Fritz Lang
Metropolis (silent film 1927, Germany)

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Plot: Sam Baldwin, a Chicago architect, has lost his wife to cancer. He and his young son Jonah move to Seattle, Washington, to make a fresh start, but Sam is still disconsolate. On Christmas evening, Jonah calls into a national radio advice show and persuades his father to go on the air with him to talk about how much he misses his wife. Thousands of women around the country, touched by Sam's story, send him letters. One letter is from Annie Reed, a journalist unhappily engaged to a nice but sneeze-prone man named Walter. Jonah, who has been working his way through the flood of mail, finds Annie's missive and likes that it mentions the Baltimore Orioles. He tries to convince his father to go to New York City to meet her on Valentine's Day, but Sam loses his temper and refuses. Jonah flies to New York and takes a taxi to to the Empire State Building, saying he's going to meet his new mother. Sam, in pursuit, catches up with Jonah, who hasn't found Annie because she's busy breaking up with her fiance. Jonah and Sam get on the down elevator just before a late Annie rushes in, but with the help of a lost backpack and teddy bear, all ends well.

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Billy Wilder
The Apartment (1960)

Plot: A heart-rending tragi-comedy/drama of a compliant insurance clerk (Lemmon) who secretly lends out his apartment to other company executives for adulterous sexual affairs and liaisons. The plot thickens when the clerk realizes that his building's elevator operator (MacLaine) is being taken for trysts by his married boss (MacMurray) to his apartment. The sophisticated yet cynical film of the early 60s is a bleak assessment of corporate America, big business and capitalism, success, and the work ethic, when a lowly but ambitious accountant enables his climb up the corporate ladder by ingratiating himself to his superiors - he literally prostitutes his own standards and moral integrity and allows himself to be exploited.

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D.J. McHale
Tower of Terror (television film 1997)

Plot: The movie begins with a flashback to Halloween, 1939. That night, at the Hollywood Tower Hotel a group of people- aspiring singer Clair, her boyfriend Gilbert, child star Sally Shine, her nanny Emiline Partridge, and a bellhop- board the elevator in order to go the party on floor twelve. When the elevator gets to floor eleven, however, a bolt of lightning violently strikes the elevator. The guests on the elevator disappear...

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Charlie Kaufman & Spike Jonze
Being John Malkovich (1999)

A puppeteer discovers a portal that leads literally into the head of the movie star, John Malkovich.

"The recurring journey within the narrative--from elevator, to tunnel in the wall, to Malkovich's mind, to a stretch of grass beside the Jersey Turnpike-- affirms that technology can serve as a non-standard but still effective gateway to the soul".

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But, just when McLoughlin gets wind that there may be something wrong in Tower 2 (news which Jimeno heard on the way down), a terrible Wrath-of-God rumbling begins, and the World caves in. Having barely made a desperate sprint to the elevator shaft, which McLoughlin -- thankfully -- had known was the strongest part of the building, the surviving members of his team find themselves entombed (and partially crushed) amid a hellish morass of concrete and twisted steel. Then -- although they have no clue what's going on -- the other Tower falls, and McLoughlin and Jimeno are left alone in the dark, hopelessly pinned underneath the smoldering wreckage of the two towers.

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Douglas Adams
The Elevator Family (2001)

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Roald Dahl
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1975)

The Great Glass Lift was a thousand feet up and cruising nicely. The sky was brilliant blue. Everybody on board was wildly excited at the thought of going to live in the famous Chocolate Factory. Grandpa Joe was singing. Charlie was jumping up and down. Mr and Mrs. Bucket were smiling for the first time in years, and the three old ones in the bed were grinning at one another with pink toothless gums.

"What in the world keeps this crazy thing up in the air?" croaked Grandma Josephine.
'Madam,' said Mr. Wonka, 'it is not a lift any longer. Lifts only go up and down inside buildings. But now that it has taken us up into the sky, it has become an ELEVATOR. It is THE GREAT GLASS ELEVATOR.
'And what keeps it up?" said Grandma Josephine.
'Skyhooks,' said Mr. Wonka.

2008-02-15T13:51:00.000-08:00

Shonda Rhimes
Private Practice (2007)

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Martin Scoresese
The Departed (2006)

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Resident Evil

Plot: Based on the popular video game of the same name, Alice (Milla Jovovich) and Rain (Michelle Rodriguez) are the leaders of a commando-team who must break into "the hive," a vast underground genetics laboratory operated by the powerful Umbrella Corporation. There, a deadly virus has been unleashed, killing the lab's personnel and resurrecting them as the evil Un-Dead. The team has just three hours to shut down the lab's supercomputer and close the facility before the virus threatens to overrun the Earth

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Sliding Doors (1998)

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Dick Maas (1983)
De Lift

Take the stairs, take the stairs. For God's sake, take the Stairs!

Plot: Lift technician Felix Adlaar becomes fascinated after he is called in to repair the elevator in an office building that has been the focus of several bizarre deaths. As the deaths continue, Felix’s obsession with trying to understand what is happening with the lift starts to get in the way of his family and job. Joining forces with a woman journalist, he uncovers the involvement of an American multi-national Rising Sun corporation who have installed an experimental protein chip computer in the elevator.

2008-02-15T12:36:00.000-08:00

Douglas Adams
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

"I go up", said the elevator, "or down."
"Good," said Zaphod, "We're going up."
"Or down," the elevator reminded him.
"Yeah, OK, up please."
There was a moment of silence.
"Down's very nice," suggested the elevator hopefully.
"Oh yeah?"
"Super."
"Good," said Zaphod, "Now will you take us up?"
"May I ask you," inquired the elevator in its sweetest, most reasonable voice, "if you've considered all the possibilities that down might offer you?"

2008-02-15T12:33:00.000-08:00

Haruki Murakami
Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1987)

"The elevator continued its impossible slow ascent. Or at least I imagined it was ascent. There was no telling for sure: it was too slow that all sense of direction simply vanished. It could have been going down for all I knew, or maybe it wasn't moving at all. But let's just assume it was going up. Merely a guess. Maybe I'd gone up twelve stories, then down three? Maybe I'd circled the globe. How would I know?"

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Haruki Murakami
“Where I’m Likely To Find It,” The New Yorker, May 2, 2005, p. 88

After my father-in-law passed away, my mother-in-law moved into an apartment in our condo, in Shinagwa. She has panic attacks. She calls, and my husband goes down to her. She called us at ten on Sunday morning, ten days ago.""He never us “I was getting ready to make pancakes. My husband disappeared. No license, no credit cards, no watch. And he'd just phoned to tell me to get the pancakes ready." "Did he take the stairs to visit your mother-in-law?" ed the elevator." This was exactly the kind of case I'd been hoping for. I went through the motions of checking my schedule. "I'm free until later this afternoon." "But we haven't talked about the fee yet." "I don't charge anything. I'm a volunteer. I have another source of income that provides me enough to live on."… She took me to her condo. "One of the reasons my husband bought this condo was that the stairs are wide and well-lit. There's a little lounge on every fifth floor." The first thing I did was walk the stairs from the twenty-sixth floor to the twenty-fourth and back a total of three times…I visited the staircase every day around 11 A.M. I made about two hundred round trips between the twenty-fourth and the twenty-sixth floor. There were other people who used the staircase. I passed a man who ran up the stairs, taking the elevator down. "I was wondering if you know Mr. Kurumizawa?" I described him. "I do know the guy. There are a few who use the stairs regularly." He didn't know any of their names. On Tuesday, I met a man who looked like a retired elementary-school principal. He knew Mr. Kurumizawa. "Did he ever mention any problems at work?" The old man shook his head. The following Friday, I met a little girl. "Is school out?" I asked. "Don't wanna talk about school." She lived on the twenty-seventh floor. "You don't walk all the way up, do you?" "The elevator's stinky." She eyed me suspiciously. “What are you doing here?" "I'm looking for a door." "What kind of door?" "Maybe it isn't even a door."… On Saturday morning, I got a call. "My husband's been found. He was sleeping on a bench in Sendai Station. Twenty days-he doesn't remember a thing. I don' see the need to continue the investigation. Are you sure you won't accept anything for your services?" "Mr. Kurumizawa," I said aloud. "Welcome back to the real world." I imagine my search will continue, a search for something that could be shaped like a door, or an umbrella, or a doughnut. Or an elephant. A search that, I hope, will take me where I'm likely to find it.